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Comment by dessant | Hacker News Reader

My favourite is when you open the Galaxy Store on a flagship Samsung phone and a popup with a promoted game is shoved in your face every single time.

The popup will often have a 3 second delay before it interrupts you due to the performance issues of their ad servers, so you open the app store and just wait there for the inevitable popup to appear before you can dismiss it to continue using the app.

The "Get news and special offers" option is disabled in the app, but none of that matters, the popup ads at app start are there on all Samsung Galaxy devices I've tested.

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You mean a 3rd-party Android manufacturer bundles bloatware?!?!

All sarcasm aside I really don't understand why anyone would voluntarily use a Samsung phone.

I have an S21 and honestly have no issues with it. Never seen any ads either. I don't use the galaxy store though(no idea what it's for tbh, it's not like you're forced to use it). As to "why" - it's extremely nice hardware, on par or better than most iPhones in my opinion, it "just works" day in day out.

"Never seen any ads" lol...

I mean please tell me where to go on this phone to find them, and I will check right this second.

Just did a fresh install last week. Outside of the Galaxy Store (which I disabled day-one), I never saw a single ad. Am I missing something?

You probably live in the US/Canada? It is bad, VERY bad on some of their phones in India.

I think the notion of Samsung phones having terrible bundled apps and janky UI might be outdated. Samsung phones got better than the previous "stock ROM" kings (Pixels and OnePluses come to mind).

MKBHD talked about this recently, https://youtu.be/qWIkBMNKj1s?t=614 timestamp included. I do not own a Samsung phone, so I can't speak to the amount of ads, but it seems they were not sleeping all these years and made the experience a benchmark for other android-flavored phones.

They became solid, somehow boring and just work. Feel free to correct me, it is just a thought.

Well, if I'm looking to buy an Android phone with the latest specs, then it's either a Pixel, Samsung or OnePlus. Out of those, I guess Pixels are less bloaty than any other phones, except if preinstalled Google apps are 'bloaty'. And there's always an option to bootloader unlock and install LineageOS.

What do you use? I currently use a pixel 2 and when it craps out I'd like to try something different.

I like my OnePlus, but they have become quite pricey of late.

Other than a Librem or PinePhone, what else would you suggest?

Shrug. They're fine. It's not hard to ignore that stuff. Honestly Apple's constant iCloud storage notifications are more annoying than pop-ups in the Galaxy Store you'll probably never visit anyways.

Galaxy Store is the only way to update several essential packages on Samsung devices, they don't publish everything on Google Play.

But you can update through the app instead which skips going through the front of Galaxy Store. That's what I've always done anyways.

That works to some extent, but there are packages which don't have a UI from which to check for updates, so you could end up with some services becoming outdated and broken, or just vulnerable.

My s21 updates all the system apps itself, I don't remember the last time I had to go into the galaxy store to do that.

Are there other options? I want wireless charging and under $600, and there is basically nothing except Samsung or no-name brands.

The delay is intentional, so that you tap "Accept" on the popup which appears just under your thumb as you were about to tap something else.

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